Your Trade
June 1, 2011 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
If, like me, you’ve been a solo professional services provider for a decade or more, you may be ready to do some manual labor, to work with your hands, not to replace, but to inspire your practice.
I’m not talking about a hobby although a hobby you love could be a gateway to your trade. My hobby was flower gardening but I’d done very little of that after selling my house in the mid-90′s. But on an impulse I responded to an ad for garden center help and that led to my own gardening services “trade“.
There was discomfort: a nagging sense that I was giving up on my core work and purpose, that I was over-diversifying and unfocused. I rationalized that it was temporary work and provided great cross-training for my rowing. But those were half-truths. Over time I realized that The Truth was believing that my work was highly specialized and intellectual although I’m equally kinesthetic. And I don’t think I’m unique in holding this contradiction.
Now I’m clear about loving my work: both my trade and my professional services both of which are expressions through work, of body mind integration. Body and mind are one whether we recognize that or not. How could we not expect to hunger for more if we cut ourselves off from one or the other?
So it seems that my blogging sabbatical is officially over. For that, I thank the dirt and the flowers and the sweat.
The Settle
April 18, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
My business is change facilitation and my sport is rowing. I’ve learned a lot about both from cox’ns who provide the inspiration for this 4th in a series of four posts about change leadership using social business initiatives as an example.
The first 3 posts were about:
- Shifting the vantage point through willingness, not willfulness.
- Releasing the fairy tale and attendant story-lines identified with what’s non-integral and non-sustainable.
- Creating the conditions in which innovation and productive friction can take place by embracing different perspectives and individual lenses on the new direction.
This post is about execution and action which require one of the most important parts of a race or practice that the cox calls: the settle. A lot of business leaders get this wrong. They launch a new project with a racing start and push everyone to hold that pace indefinitely. But its the settle that results in purposeful attention, high quality and finding the optimal rhythm together. Just like in the racing shell.
Like cox’ns, business leaders facilitate the shift from urgent desire to unity and trust, through giving the right feedback at the right time. Doing so requires a multi-dimensional awareness, what you and your team sense, feel, believe and embody..not just what you know or want.
The settle can’t be confused with settling for less because its a moment by moment refusal to be less, especially when it hurts. It must be understood as the collective action that creates shared responsibility for aligning with the desired results. In social business, those desired results are some form of creating natural influence in your communities and networks and with your audience.
If you lead like a cox’n, that natural influence could show up as gold.
The Lens On It
March 22, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Its important to understand the difference between shift in belief and shift in perspective.
Beliefs shifts are identity, the “We’re the ones who.. (experience the world and our organization’s place in that world from a single present vantage point of power).”
That shared point of power is the one from which future opportunities, capabilities, culture, innovations, networks, relationships and processes are created. An example could be a shift from a push oriented to a pull oriented belief system from which a social business direction is created.
Team, partner, group, community and organizational members’ ability to shift will depend on both their individual desires and whether their individual complex systems of beliefs, assumptions and expectations align with or contradict the change intention.
But people will have vastly different perceptions about what, why and how. They’ll experience those through a personal lens involving their strengths, weaknesses, talent, skills, personality, risk tolerance, experience, maturity, shadow behaviors and many other factors.
A typical management response is to standardize and control in attempt to neutralize the impact of perception differences but the downside is to stifle innovation and productive friction. Trailer Park Boys provides an alternative.
If you’ve never seen or heard of it, Trailer Park Boys is a Canadian mockumentary about the residents of the Sunnyvale Trailer Park who share a Utopian vision of trailer park community including get rich quick schemes, getting high, circumventing the rules and regulations and staying out of jail. The stories center around three main characters who see the means to their desired fulfillment through different lenses.
Julian is tall, dark, handsome and a natural leader. He also has a glass of rum and coke permanently attached to his hand. A career criminal, Julian is the head of the extended Sunnyvale Trailer Park family and he always tries to take care of the people in the park, especially his best friends Ricky and Bubbles.
Ricky is Julian’s best friend and business partner, grows awesome dope, generally lives in his car, doesn’t always make the best decisions though and the boys often get in trouble as a result. However, Ricky’s heart is usually in the right place, especially when it comes to his family and friends.
Bubbles is the heart and soul of Sunnyvale, not to mention the smartest person in the park. If it were up to him Bubbles would lead a quiet life in the park. Unfortunately, he’s constantly getting caught up in Julian and Ricky’s schemes and is afraid they – or even he – will go to jail again.
Trailer Park Boys web site
There’s seven seasons of problem-solving, decision-making, change leadership, capability building, innovation and creative friction metaphor if you’re willing to think outside the trailer park.
The Fairy Tale
March 15, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Social business is a direction that requires a shifted vantage point, one from which you view the world as it is, not as it was.
Social platforms and technologies are a subset of a bigger evolutionary shift in which economics and ecology are the same and can no longer be at odds with each other. That applies to the ecology of business in exactly the same way as it applies to the ecology of the biosphere. Survival depends, or inter-depends, on it.
The shifted business is holistic, or integral, meaning that everything it does is good for “me, we, you and all”. The shift is easy to grasp when there’s products involved and you’re weighing profits against labor exploited, resources consumed and environmental footprint. In professional, financial, knowledge and creative service businesses many impacts are invisible but infinitely reverberate nonetheless, positively or negatively affecting “me, we, you and all”.
All the knowledge, thought, concepts, ideas, solutions, content and actions (including social direction) initiate at the vantage point, or intention “we are the ones who….”.
How you answer that, and live up to it, and tell your new story, defines your direction and its alignment with evolution, or devolution. Its no longer possible to intend it both ways. It hasn’t been possible for decades but now is the time to let go of the attachment to the old story, which in essence has been a fairy tale. Ending the old story and replacing it with a new one creates uncertainty but doesn’t have to be a dreadful thing. That’s why the tales end with: “And they lived happily ever after.”
The Vantage Point
March 14, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Established small business owners are conflicted about social business and the shift towards “pull” platforms. They try to move in the new direction but aren’t ready to let go of habitual practices.
They’re trying to grow and develop and at the same time protect and survive. They’ll go to great lengths to “sell” me on the rationalizations and justifications for their interruption-based sales and marketing tactics and their reporting-based internal systems, structures and procedures.
I’ve learned its impossible to convince anyone to shift his or her vantage point if that business owner doesn’t sense, is in denial about, or not not able to live up to, a new direction like social business. They’re just not there and can’t make “sense” of it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lost causes.
We just have meet them where they are, let them fail and flail without judging them or jumping to unwanted conclusions on their behalf. “If you don’t act now it will be too late” is an example of one of those assumptions (and one that I’m prone to if I’m not vigilant).
Every client has a vantage point: their personal, or cultural, system of beliefs, competencies and desires. Professional service providers have two options:
- Tell them what’s wrong with where they are and what it costs them.
- Meet and accept them where they are if they’ll own it, present the corresponding opportunity and facilitate the shift to a new set of beliefs, competencies and desires.
I don’t know the right framework for the second option, but I know its not a plan.
Conscious Defiance
March 12, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I’ve been defiant and it got me into trouble with whoever had the authority over that particular domain at that particular time. It created a contradiction in me because defiance made me feel alive, powerful and real. But the cost was very high so I feared it at the same time.
Its different now that I’m aware of it, and can define it as: Discernment Discipline + Natural Aggression = Conscious Defiance. I still get in trouble and although I don’t like it, I can be present with the resistance I meet.
My favorite conscious defiance metaphor is “Stick it to the man.” from the great movie School of Rock with crazy-defiant Jack Black.
But how do you stick it to the man in the midst of The Big Shift, Great Recession, The Reset, or whatever they call the massive changes we’re in. Pretty much everyone and everything looks like and acts like “the man”?
I think Eckhart Tolle’s Present Moment Reminder helps answer that:
“Change is absolutely necessary in this world, and the dissolution of many of the ego-based structures is necessary for humanity to survive. What’s happening isn’t ‘dreadfully bad.’ It needs to happen; the intelligence behind phenomena is doing it, so it’s a good thing.”
In other words, align with evolution, defy the temptation to do anything less and leave the rest to the field.
Fear of Aggression
March 10, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
When I felt trapped and stuck in a life direction that I didn’t want and believed I had no other choice but to be in, I often dreamed of the Incredible Hulk smashing his way out of a cement box.
That dream was a gift because it gave me a visualization and metaphor that I used when I found myself in situations and circumstances that I couldn’t stand but couldn’t find my way out of. I got pretty good at smashing my way out of bad relationships, jobs, partnerships, crises etc. But the problem was that another would always pop right up to take its place.
So I tried other things like fighting harder for control over people and things in my life, setting more boundaries, screaming at the top of my lungs in my car, punching the pillows, plotting revenge and trying mostly unhealthy means of escape and distraction. But unlike Einstein’s, my universe remained an unfriendly place and I got tired.
Eventually I realized that my Incredible Hulk dream was showing me how to break out of the cement box of my own resistance and ego. The people and things trying to do me in and hold me back did not exist “out there” but in me.
Much later still, I learned to discern the difference between natural aggression and the typical way we think about it which is some form of “aggression is bad”. Natural aggression is absolutely fundamental to life: birth, love, creativity, art and change. I really got that at a gut-feeling, non-intellectual level when a read a passage from Florence Scovel Shinn about an impromptu pre-dawn visit with a friend to the Prospect Park Zoo:
A faint pink streak appeared in the East, then suddenly we heard a most tremendous uproar. We were near the Zoo and all the animals were greeting the dawn.
The lions and tigers roared, the hyenas laughed, there were shrieks and howls, every animal had something to say for a new day was at hand.
It was indeed most inspiring. The light slanted through the trees; everything had an unearthly aspect.
Then, as it grew lighter, our shadows were in front instead of behind us. The dawn of a new day!
Our shadows are in front of us now. An extremely powerful emotion is arising, individual and collective. Its natural aggression that Seth Roberts described as:
“the creative loving thrust forward, the way in which love is activated, the fuel through whose agency love propels itself.”
Denying natural aggression distorts it and turns it against ourselves. Everywhere we see the evidence that shows up as scarcity mentality, ultra-competitiveness, greed, excessive consumption, obsession with others’ transgressions and even violence and abuse.
I see and hear firsthand how hard it is for people to not attempt to escape and avoid these intensely powerful feelings despite their equally intense desire for a greater self and bigger game.
Because here’s the thing: these wild feelings are valuable pointers to the unrealized wild power within us. Now is the time to bust through the concrete walls that trap and distort it. Like I told someone earlier today: you’re going to bust-out anyway so why not roar, laugh and howl for your new dawn now and save yourself a lot of head-banging.
Let It Run
March 10, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
In rowing, one of the calls that coxswains and coaches make is “let it run”. That means the rowers stop rowing and the boat continues to move through the water on its own momentum, until it stops. Pause drills are similar. Rowers stop rowing and start again at different points in the stroke in order to feel balance, synchrony and flow.
Speakers can use these techniques because the need to “run-on” and never, ever pause completely prevents them from connecting with or relating to their listeners.
This stems partly from fear of being interrupted and losing air-time. Interruption is rampant in the attention economy. Politicians interrupt, commentators interrupt and celebrities interrupt each other even if it means hijacking a major award show:
Roger Ross Williams / Elinor Burkett at the 2010 Oscars.
Taylor Swift / Kanye West at the 2009 VMA’s.
Those aren’t the only kinds of interruptions. Others include the streams on listeners’ devices as well as on the backchannels that are now being integrated with talks and presentations. Anonymity gives cover to troll-like, negative behavior that can spread through the audience, sometimes turning it against the speaker.
These changes present new kinds of challenges for facilitators and moderators. But what can a speaker do other than try to outrace, drown out or crowd out interruptions, multi-tasking and waves of unfavorable reaction?
Stop, feel and accept the individual, collective and spatial energy in the room.
Connect with one person at a time on the deepest possible level through the pauses, letting the message resonate. Its better to be in relational presence with a few listeners by holding the space rather than to desperately or forcefully fill it up.
Rowers practice letting the boat do the work for them by allowing it to glide under them as they take their rest. In the collaborative, connected world, the lines between speakers and listeners are blurred and the dynamic has shifted. To attempt to control and resist those changes is a missed opportunity to “let it run”.
Refusing to Collude
February 26, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I woman told me the story of her anorexia. Her family couldn’t deal with it and she was eventually hospitalized. She didn’t understand the doctor’s alarm because the scale told her 100 lbs. He saw 80 lbs. and told her she would die. Although she had the evidence, what “she” saw on the scale, the doctor’s words were, thankfully, enough of a shock to get her to accept treatment and eat. She was unwilling to make the trade-off, her life, in spite of her proof that nothing was wrong. The doctor refused to collude.
Clients can get hostile when you refuse to collude. They’ll drag out the facts, proof and evidence of what’s happening to them and how it justifies their suffering in one or more personal or business domains. I’ve used that doctor’s approach, direct and hard-hitting. I lost clients. I’ve also colluded, by spending too much time listening, being empathetic and giving feedback, ideas and advice that weren’t followed. I didn’t want to be an enabler and I didn’t want failed projects. So I lost clients.
I learned. Resistance to change loves collusion and uses the proof and the evidence to get it. The only way you can help someone stop resisting is to help them see it for what is. It doesn’t work to whack them over the head with the dire consequences. These aren’t, after all, life and death situations although our clients in the grip of resistance clearly suffer.
What does work is going deep, getting to the bottom of it so to speak. What’s beneath everything that’s visible, understood and apparent is the hidden payoff. Its impossible to tell another person what that payoff is. You can only help another person realize it. That takes willingness, commitment, rigor, logic, dialog and trust. Timing is critical because resistance is a vampire. It will do anything to escape the light of reason in order to remain safe and secure in the dark.
The woman who had the strength to make it through anorexia struggled for decades with disappointment and frustration that showed up in her career, professional and business domain. It literally made her sick and frequently injured. She had the will and desire to go another way but her resistance had collected three decades of evidence that convinced her otherwise. I refused to collude.
And then there was a moment when she was able to be still long enough to ask herself: “If I’m not the one who starves and disappears, then who am I?” She answered: “I’m visible and powerful.” And there was a time in her life when she believed that visible and powerful was a dangerous way to be so she shut it down. There was no regret or grief in this realization, just relief because it all made perfect sense. She was never the effect, she was always the cause. It was the right choice at the time and she could choose differently now.
If you’re struggling with resistance to change or creativity you can do this on your own. Its a simple but powerful self-awareness tool. You have a conversation with yourself guided by these fill-in-the-blank questions:
- I’m the one who_____________
- If I’m not the one who_______________, then who am I? I’m the one who__________________
Just This Once
February 22, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
It used to be called “getting over” but you don’t hear that expression anymore. You expect it in the public so that’s not getting over. You join the private to get away from it and resent it when it shows up, which it does, more than ever. Some now call it hustle.
- The moderator continually requests that participants keep their comments within the topic, framework and agenda but the hand keeps going up and the interruption is “just this once”.
- The group’s charter includes never using the group for business solicitation or self-promotion and a new member tries to sneak one in that’s barely camouflaged and the interruption is “just this once”.
- The professional service provider provides free, search-able access to ideas, solutions and content but the uncommitted client interrupts to ask for and discuss what’s already easily available “just this once”.
This self-management technique is the best way to discern if you’re the perp or the victim of getting over. Ask yourself “what would this look like if everyone chose to do this just this once?” The key word is choose. Don’t choose or settle for the wrong hustle, unless you’re Superfly.
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The RedShift Web Site Pages and the corresponding Blog: Creating Natural Influence, do not enable comments. I'm more comfortable getting feedback on social sites than here, where the work is so close to who I am, where I've been and where I'm going. If you have a comment or question, or would like to suggest a topic for an upcoming blog article, please contact me. Thank you.
